Watering till run-off, but soil VERY dry

vampz87 said:

It would cost an arm and a leg to get yucca sent here from a place like Build-A-Soil, I can't find anything local in South Australia.......should i just buy a wetting agent at my local garden store ?

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Wetting agents are convenient, but you don't really need them to rehydrate soil that's become hydrophobic.

If you're in containers that you can lift up, just set them in a tray of water for a couple hours, or until they stop soaking it up. If not, you can take a chopstick or bbq skewer and poke a bunch of holes in the soil, going down as far as your can, and water very veryyy slowly so that it can evenly distribute, then give it a couple hours to absorb whatever runoff results from that process.

I grow aloe plants in my window all year long. When my soil is being funky i take a whole small leaf and blend it up good in a gallon of water for the ladies. It adds moisture retention and is also very nutritious. They reproduce the leaves faster than i use them and i still have enough for clones and when i get sunburns in the summer lol

mortyb said:

Awesome, I'm going to try a wetting agent out!

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Make sure your medium is homogenous first of all . The dry " water repellant " surface is a common problem. What I do is rough of the surface a tad to break up that hydrophobic top " crust " . Then I'll saturate that surface a few times with a spray bottle and let it set a couple of minutes................water gently for a nice even watering. It's just what I do.

I prefer to pre-wet my mix* to the "perfect" hand-mixed moisture level and then fill a garden pot with it and take note of the weight. Then I transfer the plant from the 16 oz plastic cup and into the garden pot. After that, when I need to water, I simply nest the garden pot into a corresponding sized bucket (ex: 3-gallon garden pot into a 3-gallon bucket) and then water from the top until the bucket fills up to the soil line. I lift the garden pot out of the bucket and let it drip for awhile. When the dripping stops I weigh the garden pot again and take note of that weight. Once I have determined those two weights, all I have to do is allow the pot to dry out to the point that it starts to get into that perfect range, again and water accordingly, thereafter, in order to maintain that soil-moisture level. Of course, over time, the plants start to add weight and then you have to start to adjust things a bit. And, when it comes time to flush, I just repeat the pot-in-bucket setup again, with plain water, in order to leach out the remaining salts. It's labor-intensive, but I only grow a few plants at a time and I really enjoy spending time with the plants so I don't mind that it's labor-intensive. I'm sure my system would be applicable for many growers who run more plants.

*I run a really open, soil-less mix with a lot of extra perlite and rice hulls in it. It drains very quickly and dries out usually in a day or two in a 3-gallon garden pot

I presume this issue has been righted? Too simple an answer to read 2.5 pages worth of discussion.

If you're getting immediate runoff, the water is not being soaked up by the soil on top, but is instead running down the sides between the dry soil and container wall. You need to water more, or more often or both. To fix this, just add water slowly and let the runoff soak in from the bottom. Water again, slowly, wait again for runoff to soak up. If after 20-30 minutes there is still water in the catch tray, your soil is likely pretty well saturated and you can either remove the excess or let it sit and continue to soak up over the next day. Don't water this deeply all the time, but do make sure you're not letting the soil dry out in the first place.